Falkland Islands Deployment

So the mail finally arrived. All 500 bags of it after it had apparently got lost somewhere... and so we basically had Christmas morning onboard! I got lots of DVDs, a couple of letters, and some sweets and a jumper (thanks Laura- I'd love to say I hate the jumper, but I really love it!) ...and here's me eating some of the sweets I got sent, wearing my new jumper!

I've just been in Valparaiso for the last 2 weeks, which included a weekend in Santiago. Valparaiso is all very old and not very lively, so every day I went out, we got a metro 20 minutes up the coast to 'Vina Del Mar', which is full of shops and bars and pretty much everything commercial... But the one thing that is really great here, is the markets. There's lots of them, and they are all very diverse. Unfortunately for me- every single one had a few stalls selling weird and wonderful native and hand-made musical instruments... everything from little plucky string things to full on animal skin side-drums and sitars! Take a look at the photos! I won't say everything that I bought, but my favourite instrument was a "Charango"- basically like a small guitar, like a mandolin, with 10 strings... sounds amazing. I loved it so much I bought a hippy colour case to keep it in as well... The plan is to now learn it over the next 3 months or so and then go busking at Christmas.

There's not much else really to say about Valparaiso and Vina Del Mar, as I haven't really explored them like I have done in other places- but this fortnight was designed as rest and recuperation, and that's exactly what I've done. I can tell you that the bars are good, and the restaurants too... (McDonald's not so good...) £1 gets you a litre of Corona...

So instead of going skydiving, or skiing or something that I would have definitely loved, I got a hotel in Santiago for the weekend. It's a pretty big place- 5 million is the population. We got stuck into the markets as soon as we got there, and if you like shopping, Santiago's not a bad place to go. In the evening (Friday 4th), we were recommended to go to a club called 'The Murano' in Las Condes, which is the rich area in Santiago. Clubs open at midnight here, and close at 5am- so we had a meal first before having a late night! It was absolutely brilliant though (I don't go clubbing much)... I started dancing like (apparently) only I can- kind of like slow motion falling over I think... mind you, a girl called Carolina liked it... though, she really didn't speak any English. Kind've a problem. Well no, that's a lie- the problem is that we don't speak Spanish. If you know Spanish, you can cope in any country in South America at all. We relied on Asbo a lot, he knows enough Spanish to get by. But Carolina DID speak a little German. So we tried that for a few minutes- and then realised neither of us knew what we were talking about. Apart from that, it was a great evening!

On the Saturday I went out with Olly- a massive risk as neither of us spoke any Spanish. That was immediately evident, as we went to the suburb of Nunoua, where we heard there was a jazz club. We went for what looked like a really smart Italian restaurant first- only to find that they mistook us for a gay couple (my leather jacket probably didn't help matters), and sat us down in a room on our own, for a candlelit dinner, with Wham! playing out in the background!

After that, we couldn't find the jazz club, and felt increasingly worried with the lack of English-speaking Chileans. It was about that point, after a couple of drinks, that I checked with these 2 girls to see if they spoke English. My exact question was "Are you American"- to which they replied "No. We're from California..."- the way that sort of rolled off the tongue kind of reminded me of Scottish patriotism or perhaps most Everton football fans. Their names were Casey & Annette, and they were studying something apparently... What was far more useful to us, was the fact that they spoke fluent spanish, and as me and Olly were feeling like fish out of water, we latched onto them and took them on our night out... well, I say 'our' night out, they showed us where all the best places to go were, and we ended up at a club called 'Le Ferrier'... which is the only nightclub I've been to with no moving lights. Was a little easier on the eye! After 3 months of not meeting any naturally english-speaking girls face-to-face, the evening was like a breath of fresh air for both me and Olly, and I think for them too! We all shared a lot of stories, and, er... drink- was a proper jolly knees up!

There's just one more thing that happened over the weekend that really made my week here- On saturday at 3 o'clock sharp, Olly and I were web-surfing, in order to enter the Mongol Rally 2010. It's something we'd been thinking about for a few months- but sign up typically only takes 2 minutes for 5000 teams to enter... so we were ecstatic to have our place confirmed on the rally. Over the course of the next year, we will be setting up a lot of fund-raising activities and events, to raise money for, aswell as gaining sponsorship for the rally- and all the money we raise will be going towards a few charities, like Christina Noble Children's Foundation, supporting kids in Mongolia. I won't blab too much more about this now, because I'll be using all my social time to do it when I get back- but basically I'll be driving 10,000 miles through massively dangerous territory in a 1 litre car, over terrain such as the ghobi desert and various mountain ranges. It's stupid, and death is a massive likelihood. That's why we'll be expecting some generous donations!

So I've put a whole load of photos below of random places that I've been or people I've met over the last couple of weeks: